Torn Hawk

The Brooklyn-based audio-visual artist Luke Wyatt aka Torn Hawk has – like Jahilliya Fields, who also is a part of this year’s program – published on the trendsetting record company L.I.E.S. (Long Island Electrical Systems). It tells us a lot about the company and its musical width that an artist like Wyatt creates his guitar-influenced lo-fi-collages inside their walls – but of course it tells us something about Wyatt’s music as well, ever since L.I.E.S chose to publish it.

If everyone had not already forgotten the term “chillwave”, Torn Hawks would be a great example on that genre when it’s best, because of his worn out nostalgic adaptations of the 80s- and 90s’ ringing VHS-sound with a thick inspiration collected from the film media. Drum machines, which sounds like they came from the neighbour, constitutes the essence in a music, which floats aesthetic and breaks unexpectedly, with layers of guitar-noise, cheesy synth work, melancholic melodies and a general backward use of substandard sound pictures.

His spherical and particular mixture of effect – coated, resounding guitar figures and exhausted beats presents itself as a fragmented crossoverbetween half washed out memories and references – like nostalgia in a gritty blur.